Np, not that kind, nor Ted

Charles McGrath has an article in The New York Times entitled Need a Broad? Call Turner:

In Matthew Lombardo’s play High, Kathleen Turner plays a nun, of all people. This is the same actress whose character in Body Heat had a thermostat set so high she melted the brains and willpower of any man who got too close; who was a contract killer in Prizzi’s Honor and a prostitute in Crimes of Passion; and who in her previous Broadway appearance, in 2005, played a notably blowsy and vicious Martha in an acclaimed revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Before that, in 2002, she was the main reason for seeing the ill-conceived Broadway version of The Graduate, because in one scene she wore only a pair of high heels.
Her new role transforms Ms. Turner only so much. She is not a veiled and wimpled mother superior type, like the Sister Aloysius character in Doubt, but a brassy, foul-mouthed, ex-alcoholic nun who works as an addiction counselor, bullying her patients into sobriety.
Mr. Lombardo, himself a recovering addict, said recently that he wrote the play with Ms. Turner in mind. He had originally hoped that she might play the lead in Looped, his bio-play about Tallulah Bankhead, which had a brief Broadway run last season. When she turned him down, because she had already portrayed Bankhead in a one-woman touring show, he began to think of her as Sister Jamison in High. The character, he explained, is partly a composite of his mother; a tough old-school nun who taught at South Catholic High in Hartford; and of his own, no-nonsense sobriety sponsor.
“What made Kathleen Turner right for the part?” he said. “In a word, I needed a broad, and when you think of a broad, you think of Kathleen Turner.”
Ms. Turner is 56 now and has not attempted to roll back the numbers on her odometer, or hide the wear on her tires. “I’m late-middle-aged, honey,” she said recently, neither bragging nor apologizing. She suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, for which she has had to take powerful medication for years, and went through a well-publicized period of alcohol abuse. She has had so many operations on her knees and feet that she calls herself bionic. “You don’t ever want to go to the airport with me,” she said. “I always set off the alarm, and then they have to pat me down.” She shook her head. “While they’re doing it, they say these sweet things: ‘Oh, I just love your work.’”
Between scenes at a rehearsal hall near Times Square recently Ms. Turner occasionally bent over and stretched her back or pumped her knees like a majorette, but seldom stopped moving, let alone sat down. Stephen Kunken, who plays the priest in charge of the addiction center, said of her: “I’m amazed at Kathleen’s vitality and resilience. At the end of the day I’m exhausted, and I’m only in half the scenes. She’s in all of them, and she goes all out. She doesn’t hold back.”
High, which is now in previews and opens at the Booth Theater on 19 April, is a three-character play in which Evan Jonigkeit plays a young addict with no scenery and a minimal set. Ms. Turner’s part calls for her to step forward frequently and address the audience directly, a risky device that she called “grave and testing”.
Even in rehearsal, she commandeered an invisible spotlight during these monologues, speaking intimately and yet in a way that filled the hall. “That part really is sheer personality,” she admitted afterward. “To hold the audience’s attention and have them care so much about what you’re feeling and thinking and doing, it’s more than just acting.”
For scenes like this it also helps to have Ms. Turner’s voice. No longer as sultry as it was, say, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it’s so low these days that it practically rumbles. At moments in High her voice is raspy enough to strip paint; at others it’s as cool, as Raymond Chandler once said, as a cafeteria dinner; and at still others it takes on a mellow, burnished warmth, like well-aged whiskey. The daughter of a diplomat, Ms. Turner grew up all over the world, and her accent shows it. Some of her vowels have a British inflection, others a tropical, Latin slowness. She sounds like nobody else, and yet familiar somehow: she talks the way Bankhead and Joan Crawford and so many of the great movie stars used to talk.
Who wouldn’t listen to her? The rehearsals for High were unusually collaborative because Ms. Turner and Mr. Jonigkeit had appeared in the play three times before— in Hartford, Cincinnati and St. Louis— and they and the director, Rob Ruggiero, were trying to build on previous performances while bringing Mr. Kunken up to speed. Ms. Turner, brimming with suggestions while thinking on her feet, sometimes seemed like a second director. “If I have an idea, I’m going to blurt it out,” she said. “Rob encourages that here but, even if he didn’t, I probably would anyway. I’m not always tactful, though I try to be. I do know this job, man. I’ve been doing it for 35 years.” She added: “It’s my belief that the lead actor is responsible for a lot more than just acting. It’s my job to set the tone, the commitment, the level of courtesy and respect. I feel like I’m the moral center.”
By now, Mr. Ruggiero and Ms. Turner know each other so well that they practically communicate by shorthand. But recalling the beginning of their collaboration, he said: “There was a time early on when I realized that you just have to move past the fact that Kathleen Turner is in the room. She’s a strong woman with her own opinions but also very respectful. She has tried everything I have ever asked, even if she wasn’t in full agreement.” He added: “Kathleen is a real theater person. When we were on the road, she was offered better housing, better perks, and she insisted on being treated the same as the others. I don’t think she knows how to take the easy road.”
Ms. Turner recently finished making The Perfect Family, with Emily Deschanel and Jason Ritter, a movie about a wife and mother who aspires to be Catholic Woman of the Year, even though her own family falls far short of traditional Catholic values. “I guess this is my year of Catholicism,” she said, adding that she is not personally religious and finds some of the church’s positions on women “appalling”. What drew her to the character of Sister Jamison, she went on, is that she likes “women of strength and character; women who don’t wait around for men to do things for them.” For the same reason, she has mixed feelings about the plays of Tennessee Williams, which ought to be such natural vehicles for her, or for her voice anyway. She was an acclaimed Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1990 and imagines she might like to do Sweet Bird of Youth one day. “But some of those other Williams characters,” she said, “they don’t take enough care of their own lives. They’re too passive.” Her next theatrical project, a revival of Red Hot Patriot at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles in 2012, is a one-woman show based on the life and writings of the journalist Molly Ivins, of whom that could hardly be said. “Part of what you get to do is what comes along, and part of it is instinctive,” Ms. Turner explained, and acknowledging that these days people will pay to see Kathleen Turner no matter what she’s in, she added: “I don’t think I have the kind of vanity that dwells on how I’d like to present myself. That sort of does not compute for me. The last thing I think about onstage is what do they think of me, because it’s not me then. It’s her. What do they think of her? On the other hand I’m always amazed by how much people seem to care. They come up to me on the street and say, ‘Love you’ or ‘Looking good, Kathleen.’ Who wouldn’t have this several times a day? It’s not exactly suffering.”